by Michael Hurley
Public diplomacy (PD) work in the Soviet Union and Russia from the Cold War to the current time has presented some unique and variable challenges. As an example, during the pre-1985 Cold War years, interaction with in-country media was most often possible only by attending Foreign Ministry press briefings. In the Gorbachev era, 1985-91, this began to change. In the Yeltsin years, 1991-99, the Russian media became much more open to questioning Russia’s own past, and it was also much easier for western journalists to get appointments in the ministries. In the Putin years, 2000 to the present time, independent Russian media have disappeared from Russia and report in Russian to home and abroad readers from exile. PD practitioners have had to adjust across the full range of public diplomacy activities, including dealing with the media.
In this article I will draw on my personal and professional experiences from the 1970s to the 2020s to look briefly at some of the challenges of conducting public diplomacy over the years in this closed society and recount how I and my colleagues achieved some successes in our work. I’ll conclude by looking at some of the current challenges public diplomacy faces.
In the Beginning
The public diplomacy ground game in the Soviet Union was initially under the rubric of the Agreement Between the USA and the USSR on Exchanges in the Cultural, Technical and Educational Fields, signed in January 1958 (Exchanges Agreement). In those days, the Communist Party and the government in the Soviet Union were genuinely interested in telling their story to the people of the US, giving them an opportunity to demonstrate their own scientific and cultural achievements.
1970s
Under the Exchanges Agreement as amended from 1959 to 1991, the US and the USSR staged national exhibitions in each other’s countries on themes of their own choosing. The first US exhibit was in Moscow in 1959 and featured the “Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate.” I was a Russian-speaking exhibit guide in the 1970s on three separate exhibits.
Our ability to interact with Soviet citizens in the 1970s had its limits. All travel outside the exhibit cities was strictly controlled by the KGB-controlled Intourist travel agency. We were faced with daily encounters on the exhibit floor with agitators who asked questions on sensitive topics in the USA: race relations, poverty, crime, Americans’ love of guns. Articles in Soviet publications were often hostile, “exposing” the lies the exhibit guides were telling. Voice of America and Radio Liberty broadcasts were jammed. There was local surveillance of our dating habits with Soviet citizens (and sometimes threats to their parents about getting too friendly). Candidates we selected for the International Visitor program were replaced with “more senior and deserving Party members.” And exhibit visitors often had a defensive and dismissive attitude to the US abundance on display: “U nas luchshe,” “We have better stuff.”
But the numbers don’t lie. Soviets were curious and eager to encounter this “beast from the capitalist West”-rain or shine 10,000 Soviets per day visited our pavilions. Guides were able to get the important messages across and we were not scripted (e.g., many of us were openly opposed to the war in Vietnam). The vehemence of the reaction to our presence in Soviet media surely indicated a level of our effectiveness. Invitations from the bolder among the exhibit visitors to have a meal with them in their homes were so frequent that, though we were mostly in our youthful 20s, we eventually had to politely curtail such engagements.
1980s
My first tour in Embassy Moscow was 1987-90. Many of the obstacles to doing public diplomacy from the 1970s were still in place (travel restrictions, surveillance, a not quite independent media), but in the Gorbachev years this began to change. Two examples of these changes stand out for me: travel, and the new “glasnost” policy for dealing with Soviet media.
In my first tour in the embassy, I was responsible for making advance trips to judge whether a city could accommodate our exhibit (were there hotels, did they have a venue, or would we have to build our own?). In the 1980s, I was able to visit Khabarovsk, Magnitogorsk, Chisinau, Dushanbe, Donetsk, Sevastopol, Baku, Odessa, Almaty, Volgograd, Leningrad, Ashkhabad, Tashkent, Irkutsk, and Vladivostok. Vladivostok in 1989 was of particular interest as it had been a closed city (opened to Soviets only in 1988 and opened to foreigners in 1992). It was the headquarters for the staff of the Soviet Pacific Ocean fleet.
In Vladivostok (a city almost as far from Moscow as from New York), I spoke with government officials, journalists, taxi drivers, army officers, and a musician. There was a strong sense of resentment of Moscow due to resources flowing out of the Far East to the political center. People had begun to form groups to discuss concerns about the environment, and there was even talk of forming a far eastern Republic. Russian journalists wrote about local crime, housing shortages, and corruption. Vodka and sausage were said to have disappeared from store shelves for months at a time.
So here was a great opportunity to engage in public diplomacy via the exhibits program. I appeared on a local TV news broadcast and was interviewed by daily newspapers on US-Soviet relations. These interviews were not possible in the 1970s.
Another part of public diplomacy in a closed society is dealing with the state media. Over the years the Soviet government and party institutions developed a substantial cottage industry of what is now referred to as fake news and misinformation about the United States, capitalism, and the West in general. In the Gorbachev years, this began to change as the policy of glasnost (openness) took hold.
Prior to 1987, the embassy had not been able to work with the host country media to explain US policies on major issues, though by this time Soviet organs had been able to publish their points of view in major US publications. To test whether glasnost was real, I was assigned to approach Izvestiya, the organ of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, with a proposal to publish an opinion piece by Max Kampelman, chief US arms control negotiator.
I had three sessions with Nikolai Yefimov, a no-nonsense deputy editor who gleefully noted that Soviet articles in e.g., The New York Times would reach only one million subscribers, while Izvestiya had a circulation of 10 million. The back-and-forth lead finally to the publication of Kampelman’s piece on August 26, 1987. An accompanying editorial note mentioned Izvestiya’s grudging agreement to publish, not forgoing the opportunity to point out once again the far greater readership of the Soviet newspaper.
1990s
Momentous changes happened in the transition from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, as the Soviet Union shed its former Republics, including the Russian Federation. Early experiments with democracy and capitalism largely failed and there was great poverty and blatant corruption in the early 90s. I returned to Embassy Moscow in 1998. By that time, it was possible to have a more fully developed traditional public diplomacy program, (e.g., the International Visitor program), with only minimal interference from ministries, a full-fledged Fulbright program, and numerous academic, professional, and cultural exchanges.
We devoted resources to a new type of activity: American Corners. These were small libraries, usually inside a Russian academic institution, funded by a US Embassy micro-grant and fully staffed by Russians from their own facility. At the height of the program, I believe there were 56 American Corners in Russia.
This has since been pared back to zero, reflecting the general downturn in US-Russia relations. Even the American Center, a virtual destination housed inside the embassy, was recently closed.
2000s
The transition from Yeltsin to Putin changed the equation once again. The Putin regime gradually tightened its grip on independent media. As an example, by April 2001, the (Putin regime’s) giant energy conglomerate Gazprom took over independent TV broadcaster NTV (I was surprised at the time at the lack of street protests). The embassy’s ability to interact with Russian media became more complicated and our programs to train and support Russian journalists were squeezed by the regime’s intimidation of media trainers and journalists. Public diplomacy programs were nevertheless allowed to function for a few more years.
My last Embassy Moscow tour was 2009-12, as public affairs officer. Despite the limitations, conditions were ripe for an important new engagement: in July 2009, President Obama and President Medvedev created the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission “to improve coordination between our two countries, to identify areas of cooperation….” The Commission consisted of thirteen working groups. I had responsibility for the Sports, Culture, Media, and Education group. Deciding to focus on culture, I designed and raised funds (more than $2 million in the private sector in Russia) for “American Seasons in Russia,” a program of at least fifty separate components that afforded the opportunity to show the Russian audience in two dozen cities the depth and diversity of culture in the US. Russians knew much about US pop culture, but very little of our deeper cultural traditions such as native American music and arts, zydeco, gospel, blue grass, modern dance, country music, musical and dramatic theater, and so many others. The centerpiece of our two-year cultural festival were the April 2012 Moscow and St. Peterburg concerts of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Muti (the Orchestra had last performed in Russia in 1990). We knew we had connected when one of the Russian sponsors, the Russian Railway system, gave us the use of an entire speed train to transport the Orchestra from Moscow to Petersburg.
For me, this was the very essence of public diplomacy: to create numerous opportunities to engage with the Russian public, thereby assuring them of our common interests.
And Now
Public diplomacy practitioners sometimes ask: is it really worse for public diplomacy in Russia now than in Soviet times? I believe the unfortunate answer is, in many ways, yes. Yes, we have social media now and the Russian general public can be better informed as to how the world works outside their borders. But the signs were already beginning to manifest even when I left Moscow in 2012: there was a new, more restrictive Press Law being discussed that limited foreign ownership of Russian publications and made it easier for the authorities to silence its critics; the 2012 enactment of the Foreign Agents Law that “required any person or organization receiving any form of support from outside Russia or deemed to be under foreign influence” to register as a “foreign agent“; the Peace Corps was asked to end its mission in Russia in 2002 (the first of many subsequent closings of US affiliates); and media self-censorship returned as the reporting environment for Russian journalists became more restricted.
Doing public diplomacy in a closed society requires a knowledge of the society, meaning learning the language and making the personal one on one interactions for exchanges and cultural performances. Our ability to know the Russian people, however, has been severely circumscribed. In a series of reciprocal cutbacks, the three US consulates and consulates general were shuttered (St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, and Vladivostok). For the first time that I know of, Foreign Service Officers from the public affairs section were declared persona non grata in 2022. The section’s local employees were removed in 2021 (in 2009-12, the public affairs section and the consulates had a total of 75 foreign service and local employees).
What remains of public diplomacy today relies on an overburdened embassy public diplomacy staff who are able to message through the embassy’s website and support the ambassador on official visits. The current atmosphere is poisoned by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s turning to Russian philosophers from the Soviet fascism tradition, with their strange and baseless propounding of myths that attempt to restore the lost glory of Imperial Russia (for example by citing the “1,000-year arc of Russian history” and belittling Ukrainian culture.
Prospects for real public diplomacy in Russia have dimmed. The Russians no longer care about impressing us with their scientific and cultural achievements as they did during the days of the Exchanges Agreement. Everything is transactional.
Michael Hurley joined the Foreign Service with the US Information Agency in 1985. His Russia experience: student in 1972; USIA exhibit guide 1973-74, 1976-77; Embassy Moscow 1987-90, 1998-2003, 2009-12. In Russia as public affairs officer, Hurley was the chief architect of a two-year celebration of US culture, raising $2 million in the private sector in Russia to create “American Seasons in Russia,” culminating in the appearance of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Muti. In 2023, he was hired on a one-year stint with the State Department’s global engagement center to counter Russian disinformation.